I’ll start here: Soldiers from India were at Dunkirk in World War II. That’s it really, a simple fact. Nonetheless Christopher Nolan skipped the Lascars in his recent all-twink flag waver, which makes it a lie. Calling it a lie is acknowledging facts. In other news most cowboys were Black, Native, and Mexican, and most white non-English US immigrants kept their languages and cultures well into the 20th century. Denying those things is lying. To lie about another culture is to deny facts.

Hand-wringing about Outrage Twitter and periodic pearl-clutching about call-out fatigue are really just covering up for liars. Yes, nobody died when Roland Emmerich lied about the Stonewall riots by replacing brick-throwing NY Latinx Sylvia Rivera with non-existent Indiana mayonnaise “Danny”. But he did erase her. He rejected reality. It’s a lie. This is important because a frequent component of appropriation dismissal is “but we’re all human”. Yes, we are, appropriation says everybody’s human, even the brown people.

Making one group matter, and the other not, makes an absurd standard. First, it’s an ad hom. Second, it’s the contradiction of testimony for ‘harm’ demanded from people whose testimony has already been dismissed as irrelevant. All for a hollow pay-off: victim fights to be recognized for existing, in order to even be capable of being harmed, before getting to the harm. Sea-Lioning accomplished!

All of this in the hope of disproving the nonsensical claim lying isn’t lying. It’s why casual racism is easy to spot, it’s entirely circular reasoning, broad half-truths, and blind guessing to erase whole people. Rules like data, witnesses, and disproof evaporate. One example is Sonny Hallett’s essay on “owning” culture [linked in intro]. In the middle she claims non-Asians are being shamed for cooking food like rice; which is wrong because she won’t be shamed for cooking rice, since she looks Asian; but she can’t cook; proving Chinese = Rice is stupid. Not a single drop of proof, no quotes. The reader has to assume ‘Ricists’ exist, assume they’d give her a pass based on how she looks rather than if she knows anything about China, assume they’d stop others who weren’t Chinese, which somehow proves appropriation is dumb. By the way, all of this depends on the Ricists being from China, rather than India where they also grow rice. She erases all the other countries who eat rice to prove erasure and appropriation don’t exist. The section is a two paragraph lie. Plus, I should tell you I’m plugged in to the Super-Secret SJW Cuck Network™ and there’s no memos to #boycott an Uncle Ben’s or Mahatma factory. Her whole ramble is just gibberish and several criticized other parts of her over-simple and flimsy arguments.

Another example might be Farah Shah [linked in intro] who calls the concept of appropriation toxic, then goes on a mini-rant about “NDNs” not letting her use the term “spirit animal”. Much like Hallett, she doesn’t cite anything, like a tribe who banned the term for non-Natives maybe. But what does the “NDN” mean…? I have no idea. She discusses Blacks and never says “BLK”, she discusses Egyptians and never says “GYP” (maybe because it’s an insult). The reader can only guess from context she’s saying “Indian” but she’s so busy erasing them she’s erasing the very letters. Being a minority doesn’t give her a pass. Maybe she doesn’t like call-outs because she gets called out on stuff.

Spirit Animals — Marika Paz

Plus, the whole spirit animal thing comes from nowhere and stays there. She brings it up several times for no reason. She doesn’t even quote non-Natives complaining. Which is funny because there’s tons of blogs, vlogs, and tweets out there. If Shah was trying she’s spoiled for choice: philosophically here; touchy-feely here; bitchy here… She could note “familiar” and “totem” is worldwide so Natives have no exclusive right. She doesn’t. Notably, most of the links I gave were permissive when it was used respectfully. They only universally objected if it was thrown around as cheap meme-fodder by shallow bloggers. Maybe she’s just a bigot.

Again, she can say what she likes. For proof no one is stopping her see the several blogs she’s written on how much everyone is silencing her. She’s not silenced, she’s criticized, and she doesn’t like it so she lies about it. She can claim “NDNs” are selfishly stopping her fun, meanwhile she’s just spewing bile while calling everyone “toxic”. It’s not an argument. Lionel Shriver’s “passing fad” article [linked above] agrees with Shah’s but adds the twist of saying being a fiction writer frees her from having to be honest. So, when readers criticize writers for employing clichés it’s the readers fault for reading the book wrong and ruining her fun. I’ve heard this before…

She’s a cheap cynic, telling readers she doesn’t respect them but they should buy her stuff anyway to stick-it to The Man or whatever. It’s no surprise she doesn’t mention when minority books get written, white school and library administrators and parents just ban them. Shriver’s a liar. It’s fitting Shriver’s top selling book is of a mother who never takes responsibility for her own part in creating a monster who destroys lives. In my minds eye I see Shriver ending the speech by shaking a cane and telling everyone to get off her lawn.

So, appropriation…? Funny thing, there was no Native outcry for the video game Fallout: New Vegas. I promise, it’s oddly relevant. No Native seemed to notice the add-on Honest Hearts. It’s odd because the plot to HH is two white Mormons helping some ‘tribals’, who speak in broken English, against a foreign army. It’s a brown-face white savior story. It’s Dances with Wolves for the XBox360, and there was no SJW outcry. This is important.

First, there’s a good chance most Natives, even who game, never played HH. It was released near a year after the original. It wasn’t a major film or sports team. But potential ‘allies’ played it and they didn’t lose their minds either. Even the rageblog perpetual target Anita Sarkeesian was silent on the subject when discussing other aspects of the Fallout series. Despite the many and obsessiverumors to the contrary, all SJWs don’t complain about all things no matter how trivial and the coming Orwellian Nightmare was averted another day (speaking of Orwell, for hating groupthink so damn much, the anti-SJWs, #skeptics and #rationals do all seem to cite the same books and game criticsa lot and at length). But there were other factors:

Some of the tribes want to join the army and others don’t. They have different ideas. They’re diverse, not waiting for death or rescue by whites.

They speak broken English because English is their 3rd even 4th language. The dialog says whites made contact by sending a linguist.

They are diverse because their ancestors were Natives and whites who survived nuclear war. They’re healthy, smart, with strong social ties. Whites and Natives merged. Their culture is a shared identity, not color.

They’re not tropes. Neither are the White Saviors. Both Mormons are flawed, with different motives and definitions of ‘salvation’.

Most of all, the FO:NV add-ons combined to follow a primary Native antagonist, Ulysses, who has lost his culture. He tells the story of people copying his traditions to be like him and how it insulted him. The player doesn’t even meet him until the fourth add-on, the end of an arc with no effect in the main game. Ulysses is one of the most nuanced characters in the Fallout canon and he’s filler. He’s an anti-SJW Rage dream, inclusion no one needed! Yet no #culturalmarxism outcry or RationalWiki page.

A compelling character, written well, and players embraced it. Repeat: The angry brown guy tries sparking a war because white people appropriated his dreadlocks, and even 4chan didn’t complain (one post quotes Ulysses’ saying it and they all debate his merits). 4chan…! The shorthand for a fog-bank of dudebro trolls where Snowflakes go to die violently, the wild breeding grounds of the reactionary Pepe memes, and a follow-up comment agrees symbols have meaning and his reasoning is valid. Now, it’s 4chan, some couldn’t resist dropping an n-bomb, BUT the buried lead is, in the middle of overt racism, nobody denied the premise. Even 4chan thinks appropriation is a thing! In other news up is now down, cats and dogs are living together, our tentacle-mouthed destroyer will be rising from the depths shortly…

Or Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. Over 20 million units and one of the most award-winning RPGs of all time. No Breitbart thinkpiece about the tribal Forsworn or the turbaned Redguard, and they’re overt proxies for Aborigines and Arabs. One quest in Skyrim even requires the player join a tribal terror cell to help them (with the choice to kill the leader or not with no loss of Reputation either way and it doesn’t destabilize their efforts much). Nobody noticed… If, according to all these bloggers and pundits, we’re ten seconds from a thought-police crybully triggered wasteland, someone would have said something by now. Milo Yiannopoulos, famous for #GamerGate and militant critic of “leftist” identity politics, gave Skyrim and FO:NV not one paragraph. Milo was tech editor. If 1984 is coming, where?

I know at least one factor in the absence of hot take shots fired about New Vegas, or ‘culture war’ debates over the Redguard indoctrinating kids to Islamic Terrorism sympathies: The Washington Redskin’s franchise clocks in at near $3bil in net worth according to Forbes. There’s a good chance Natives and Blacks care more about Vanity Fair Coachella photo-spreads, than we do about Assassin’s Creed III, because we can count. The dream-catcher tattoo on your ass is silly, and we’ll laugh and point if you post it on Instagram. It’s not the open, aggressive racism of a stadium full of face-painted idiots whooping while they do the tomahawk chop. We can prioritize, I promise.

Which is why it requires so much cutting to get through the noise. knowing what I know (and have now demonstrated) about how little much of this ‘debate’ matters in the universe, and yet how terrible but vocal the arguments over it are, it casts Shah, Shriver, Hallett, and YouTubers like Sargon of Akkad in a terrible light: they’re losing their shit over nothing. Nobody petitioned Obsidian for Ulysses. The mini-arc they created, the characters they fleshed out, were irrelevant. Avatar was the highest grossing film of its time and it’s one giant racist trope. Nobody demanded New Vegas attempt a thoughtful portrayal of the ‘Native Experience’. Turns out they’re good writers, they wanted something unique, and they decided to just not be pricks. The real point of the whole ‘cultural appropriation’ thing, for most of us who care, isn’t a desperate need to find racists under every rock to get them banned from SnapChat. It’s not a forever game of shame wack-a-mole. It’s admitting someone’s lying. Like, not all ‘Asians’ are martial arts experts. Orgy scenes doesn’t make Sense8 progressive when their ‘Asian’ is a kickboxer. It’s. A. Lie.

Yes, some use ‘inclusion’ as a bat to break everybody’s knees, but it’s on both sides. Hallett says she once wanted dreads in her hair. She spends three paragraphs justifying why she could, since it originated in more than one culture. She’s right, but it would mean she’s enacting culture, not ignoring it. She then goes to kimono, the Silk Road, and concludes she’s transcended race as if the whole Carmen San Diego side-quest never happened. Farah’s sprinkling “spirit animal” randomly through more than one post is an obvious edgelord bid to conceal direct bigotry and terrible reasoning.

Did I mention Shah is on a reading list Hallett includes in her essay for ‘more information’? So is Shriver. It’s not surprising they employ similar mis-direction and identical bad arguments because they’re cribbing each other’s stuff. They’re not advancing the conversation, it’s an echo. Shriver blames her readers for making writing hard which was Milos’ entire shtick of provocation by self-victimhood. He mocked oppression testimonials until the second he ruined himself by joking about child molesting, justifying it with a personal anecdote when confronted. Either direct experience is only a fallacy when SJWs do it, or there are some jerks on both sides and they should be ignored for using big words badly, whether through foolishness or greed.

Clearly I’m a leftie, so my last myth to burn may seem surprising: I loathe “check your privilege”. First, it’s me asking them to do something, they can simply choose to ignore me or yell “free speech” and walk on. As a Hail Mary, I get it, but as a genuine critique of someone’s behavior it’s impotent. It’s conversational slacktavism. If they say “no”, I’m stuck. Thing is, privilege is given, it’s impossible to self-check. More important, wearing a plains war bonnet isn’t a privilege-check moment, it’s an entitled prick moment. If I object, I say it. They can accept my challenge or not, but now it’s out there. The douchecanoe ball is in their court.

@Mark Schierbecker — Nov 2015

Plus, silence is what the dog-pile net trolls want from me. The ones who lose their mind when someone points out a movie forgot a continent, they’re not trying to ‘advance the discourse’. In a recent interview with Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, darling of the #rational set, affirms my argument, through former Missouri State University professor Melissa Click’s “safe space” debacle. As he said, demands for equality which require exclusion is the rhetoric of the Klan. Yeah, that. I don’t have to shut up when someone’s being a bigot.

Finally there’s, “but all cultures are blends”. Sure, over hundreds of years. We may want cultural theft acceptable because everybody does it, but the Tradition Fallacy is a fallacy. I can’t read this article to a Kalahari Bushman, for example. Difference exists, it’s quantifiable. Different cultures also beg, borrow, and steal differently. It’s not ‘blending’ if one group takes another’sstuff. Someone wearing a Native headdress at Burning Man isn’t ‘blending’ if they didn’t learn Kiowan first.

True blends do exist and we mostly alienate or outright suppress them. There are creoles everywhere: Spanglish, Russenorsk, Ebonics… And entire education systems were created to stifle or even delete them. In the US, mocking deep southern accents and the fashion of gangster rap is almost a national sport. At the scale of countries, the US has bombed people because they prayed wrong. Simply noticing cultures have each other’s things doesn’t prove it was on purpose. It definitely doesn’t prove either party was willing.

So, the reason I say understanding appropriation is simple is this last part. We are our cultures. Everyone is. We talk different than others, dress different, eat different. No one is “the base”. Anything setting me apart from everyone else on earth can be appropriated. What matters, and where so many get stuck, is not all appropriation is bad. Some is selfish, some is curiosity. The difference is easy to spot: if everything about a person is one way, but they have one or two foreign things they’re really highlighting, and they complain when anyone questions them about it, they’re being a jerk. I don’t even have to be intending to ‘ruin’ someone’s fun. If they’re wearing overt trinkets it invites comment. Which means second, if they get ticked when people challenge them it’s because they’re stealing something.

Intent isn’t just in someone’s mind, it’s in their actions. Look at the picture. Dudes’ wearing tshirts, jorts, and some knock-off raybans, a rainbow cloth bracelet or two… They’re color-coordination needs work, and they’re dusty. They don’t stand out. Except, add random feathered headdress and now they stand out for no reason except the war bonnet. They’re wearing someone else’s culture just to call attention to themselves. On the other hand, a guy posting to Facebook asking for bok choy recipes isn’t trying to look cool he’s trying a food, he’s experiencing not aping. Now, add a tie-dye Laughing Buddha to his dining room table and the tag “I’m so ethnic today!” and the situation’s changed. Which is the point, it’s case by case. It’s being aware of one’s self and actions.

It’s where so many of these think-pieces go totally off the rails: we’re all from somewhere else so shut up about it. Sure, but for some it’s further back than others and I choose which grandma’s meals I cook, how many languages I speak, and who I hang out with. I’m no fool, part of my heritage is based on trade-&-raid tribes who were basically pirates, but we didn’t lie about it. We sure as hell didn’t whine when someone noticed us wearing it. Cracker wants to wear some feathers, fine. Catch the bird and make one, fight me for it and take it, wear the one grandma made, but don’t tell me it came from a gas station with a “Made In China” sticker but everybody stay quiet about it because they’re ‘like totally spiritualismistic and into Indian-type stuff dude.’

A family with more than one cultural tradition is fantastic. They have several influences to draw on. It’s not in the same galaxy as a family just coming from more than one place. If my father is French and Italian and fourth generation US, while my mother is first generation Haitian, there’s serious cultural potential. If I never spoke to mom in her native language, tried some of the food once and didn’t like it, and called her “Black”, I’m not multi-cultural. I’m multi-racial, culture is a whole life. Culture is how we perceive the world and our place in it, it is not a hat or random laughing Buddha.

Plus, the vocab of the other side is moronic. I laugh when I hear people say “red pill”. In The Matrix the red pill was created by the machines to trick humans into believing they’re free. The red pill is a lie. I’m baffled by the mock of “white knighting” and “virtue signaling”. First, if I’m the knight, and I’m being called out for it, it’s a call-out, which anti-SJWs say they despise. Second, if I’m the one signaling virtue, the person hating me hates the virtuous knight. Hint: the villain. Thus, “Virtue-signal white-knight blue-pill cuck” translates to ‘Good guy who recognizes fake choices and has both a husband and a boyfriend’. Protip: Insults should be, yanno… Insulting.

While we’re here, I’m fine with calling the entitled students at Evergreen State College, who detained professorsfor being white, brats. Hypocrites attacking other minority students for not being minority ‘enough’, are hypocrites. If they didn’t like the press they got they probably shouldn’t have filmed themselves being terrible human beings. Hopefully they’ll grow up. But the very fact it was news means it was out of the ordinary. They don’t represent anything about common liberals, they represent the end-product of coddling and fostering unrestrained immaturity and all sides do it.

Returning to ‘check your privilege’, wearing a headdress to a frat party is taking credit for someone else’s work. I’m not reading receipts just for asking if they’re a genuine part of my community or a tourist. Which gives a universal standard so many demand. It makes those students hypocrites by noting they’re attacking people just for being themselves, meaning they’re not affirming identity, they’re erasing it. It also denies #freespeech is not a pass to say despicable things (which turns into a wankfest anyway) by demanding a justification for punching down.

Either we’re sharing, or someone’s taking. If they’re taking they open themselves for being called on it. It also has the handy detail of already being how our laws are written in the US: we can’t lie about other people (slander), we can’t lie about ourselves (perjury), we can’t threaten people for no reason (assault)… Our own laws say words and acts have consequences, and overt meanings, and their intent matter. There’s no difference when it comes to who you claim as your people and how (hard stare at Rachel Dolezal).

I’m good with cultural appropriation being a concept we investigate for merit. Looking outside myself to see other people as independent and valuable, capable of knowing things I don’t. It’s good to support the excluded, who want others like themselves represented honestly. Yet somehow Hollywood is running out of ideas (unless demand for Gnomeo & Juliet II: Sherlock Gnome was huge and nobody told me). 22 yearolds feigning world-weary frustration any time someone asks why the Japanese guy can’t handle English are demanding we regress. Bravestarr, Captain Planet, M*A*S*H, Murphy Brown, Designing Women... Of the six leads in Saved By The Bell, three were women, one was Latinx, one Black, and they acknowledged it. Barely, and ham-fisted, but acknowledged all the same, and that was thirty years ago. Mouth-breathing ‘alphas’ are so insecure in their own masculinity and whiteness they’re arguing the decade of Reagan and AIDS denial was too “radical”. All because a few minorities with less institutional power are asking them to stop being racist dicks. Gimme a break.

All said though, this is just me writing to whoever’s reading. I can cite bad logic or terrible arguments for my thesis, but I can’t put anyone in ‘bad ally jail’. If someone is advocating for me, great. If not, it doesn’t cost them anything to not care. Fratbros in racist feathers don’t have to worry what I think. I would prefer they ask first but as I said nobody’s died because Dunkirk forgot India exists. The reason appropriation is an issue at all is most of us, most of the time, try to avoid being overt jerks. Wear the feathered headdress knowing it’s insulting, or take it off. But the #rationals of the world don’t get to whine when they’re held accountable for their own actions.

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The Piebald One

The Dark Fool dances like a harlequin, like a rabbit in a field when no one is watching. His diamonds are so deep they’re embedded in his very skin. He spirals and hops and he makes jokes that hide and reveal more and less than he knows. Here he records some of what plays in his mind, his own little mark upon the stones, like those who came before and have left us with as many questions as answers.
Oh, and there’s gonna be a lot of sarcasm, some irony, and way more than enough absurdity to go around.
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